Meaning a Life Read online

  We rented an apartment in Dallas and moved away from Jan’s house, but we were still close to her and we especially loved her intense and lovely little girl, Jan Isbelle, a long-legged child of ten or so.

  I was not well and could not work. Someone, probably Jan, told the Salvation Army to come and help us, for two ladies in uniform came to our door and brushed by George when he protested, “But we’re not religious.” The ladies left a large basket of food and came later with another, which was welcome, as we had paid our rent but had no money for food. I was pregnant, and Jan took me to have an abortion, but still I did not get well, and she was frightened. She wrote to George’s father, who sent her money which she used to take me to her doctor. It was very nearly Christmas, and a friend of George’s father wrote that we must come home, both of us. Jan outfitted me with black lace nightgowns, black underclothes, all that she would like to have had for herself, and she bought us tickets to San Francisco. I enjoyed the trip as much as I had enjoyed that first train-trip when I was five years old. As the train pulled in and slowed to a stop in Los Angeles, a feminine version of George’s face appeared on the other side of the window. It was Libby, George’s older sister. We walked and talked with her and her husband until the train left for the overnight trip to San Francisco. We had not anticipated the intensity of their curiosity about me. Libby telephoned her father after she left us, and while we were nearing San Francisco they were talking about whether they would allow us to remain together. Although their power over us was real, we did not consent to it, but we did have fears, and I dreamed. I had dreams even before we fled San Francisco the first time; in one dream, there was a contest between George’s father and me. George and I were on a merry-go-round, and if I caught the ring when we stopped I could have George; his father stood and watched.

  The family had discussed an annulment before they saw me. After they saw me they schemed to use me to trap George, and to use luxury and wealth to trap me. George was to enter his father’s business; we were to live in a house they had already chosen for us, with Erich and Adele, old household servants. In this house across the street from the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Nob Hill, which we had not even seen, we were to live in their style and to move in their sphere of society, in their city. I supposed it was a natural, normal parental attitude, especially as we were very young; we both assumed all this was a gift. George’s stepmother, Seville, took me to buy clothes; I was still wearing the clothes I had worn when I left Grants Pass, a dark blue overcoat, a ribbon for my hair, and flat-heeled shoes. I loved my big, warm overcoat because it had served as blanket at night and had stood me in good stead in our hitchhiking, keeping me warm in the cold Texas winter winds; I wore a ribbon to tie back my long straight hair, and with my flat-heeled shoes I was dressed very much as June, George’s nine-year-old sister, was dressed when I first saw her beside the door of their apartment. She was attending a convent, and her eyes were big, waiting to catch her first glimpse of “the painted ‘hoor’ Buddy had run off with.”

  Seville had selected a complete wardrobe from a description of me by Miss Lawlor, the secretary. We went to the store, and I tried on beautiful dresses, coats, underclothes, and shoes. Next we went to a hairdresser, who taught me to comb and dress my hair. Seville bought me a hairpiece, similar to one my mother had, which she had called a “rat.”

  “When you come to visit me,” said Seville, “wear your girdle and always wear gloves and see that Buddy has his nails manicured.” I got through the day and joined George at the hotel room which his father had engaged for us. George had spent a day similar to mine, and that evening we were to be dressed in new clothes to meet the parents’ friends and relations. We telephoned Nellie and Jack in our first free moment and told them, “Come over tomorrow and see all the clothes we’ve been given.” When they came we were wildly gay; we tried on the clothes and found there were plenty for them and for us, too. We dressed in the new clothes and went out for a 50-cent meal in North Beach to celebrate being together again.

  George agreed to go to work in one of his father’s theaters. “Not to learn the business, but because you ask me to do it,” George explained to his father. “We do not intend to stay in San Francisco. We do not accept this plan for our lives.” George worked evenings at the theater, and Seville asked me to spend the evenings at their house. I wandered about, watching the bridge game and listening to their conversation—these ways were not our ways.

  My father-in-law went with us when we rented a studio on Montgomery Street, a very beautiful room two stories high, with a balcony where we slept. Later he sent us overstuffed leather furniture. It was strange letting someone decide for us what to work at, where to live, what clothes to wear, even the way to spend our evenings; he was shaping our lives in the shape of his life. We were patient and we complied for a while to please him, but George protested often that we were not going to stay. I seemed to be floating in a nightmare which was made seductive and silken, as when George’s father took me to buy jewelry and gave me George’s mother’s ring. They assumed I would be persuaded, and that I would hold George to this life of luxury and comfort.

  We thought the hotel room and the clothes were gifts, but the manager explained to us that we owed for the room and for the many things that had been sent collect to us. George said, “I am sure my father will take care of all that,” and we moved out. But we were still removed from our Berkeley friends, and I wandered in the evenings in Seville’s drawing-room in a strange limbo. I remember reading Lewis and Clark’s reports of discoveries in the Northwest, Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey, and Doughty’s Arabia Deserta–all travel documents.

  (In Cambridge, England, in 1972, our host Jeremy Prynne said one evening, “I have a key to the rare bookroom in our library—would you like to visit it?” He walked directly to a cupboard, unlocked and reverently took out in both hands a box, and unwrapping the contents carefully laid before us Charles Doughty’s tiny notebook, handsewn, with his list of words in Arabic and his medicine kit. All of it could have been placed in a cigar box, and nothing Prynne could have shown me would have pleased me more.)

  Seville’s day began with breakfast in bed, brought to her by her maid at nine-thirty. At ten the masseur arrived to give her a massage. She then discussed with her maid the clothes she would wear that day. She returned to bed to conduct the business of the house: dinner invitations, engagements of all sorts arranged by telephone, interviews with the cook and housekeeper concerning the dinner that would be served to a full table of guests almost every night, and a talk with the gardener if necessary; any number of household affairs were taken care of from her bed, before she set out for the day. At eleven the chauffeur appeared at the door, and Seville was driven to the clothing stores, to I. Magnin or to Ransohoffs, or to a hairdresser. Clothing which had been delivered to her the day before was returned if Seville had decided against it. In the stores Seville’s personal saleslady came forward to greet her and show her first the new arrivals from Paris. At one o’clock Seville usually met her friend Germaine, and they lunched in an expensive restaurant. They were greeted by the head waiter, who suggested food, and a great discussion took place because Germaine and Seville were always on a diet. After lunch they went to their afternoon bridge game (for a brief time the game was Mah Jong). They played these games quite well, as they gambled to make the game more intense. At five Seville returned home to rest, bathe, and dress in evening clothes for dinner and for the bridge party which followed. Here the talk was of the stock market and of their investments. Seville was the daughter of a paint manufacturer who also manufactured linoleum, and Seville’s stock in her father’s company provided a large part of her income. All her friends dealt in stocks and bonds, and this discussion interested them perhaps more than any other; the subject was never far from their minds.

  In Seville and George’s father’s house the latest books on the best-seller list were always lying about, because their bo
okseller sent over any books he thought might interest them. Literary talk was not entirely absent, and George’s father was sensitive and intelligent; it was just that literature was not taken seriously in the household. George’s outspoken desire to be a poet and writer was taken lightly as a youthful aberration from which he would recover with maturity. George and I, with our marriage, introduced a factor to be dealt with so suddenly that our plans and desires were not taken into consideration; their attitude was that we would settle into their social set with relief and gratitude at being rescued from our way of life. Our brief concern with college and education was to them also an aberration, a diversion from the career of business, to be cast aside as we got down to serious aspects of life: bridge, the stock market, business, shopping, and a child or two. George’s younger sister was entirely loved and valued and I understood their treatment of us as I watched their treatment of this girl when she later tried to leave home, get an education and break away from her parents’ patterns.

  We were constantly searching—searching in our travels, in our pursuit of friends and in our conversation concerning all that we saw and felt about the world. We were searching for a way to avoid the trap that our class backgrounds held for us if we relented in our attempts to escape from them. We understood from our experiences while hitchhiking that in the United States we were not required to remain in the class into which we were born. We wanted to see a great deal of the world, and the education of which we talked for ourselves was to leave our class and learn our life by throwing ourselves into it.

  Soon I went to work in the Alexandria theater where George was working. One day the manager did not come to work and George was told, “From now on you will be the manager.”

  Next day George went to see the manager, who had been fired from the job. “I do not want your job,” George told him.

  “Oh, yeah!” replied the unbelieving manager.

  We went to see George’s father and explained once more that we meant what we had said about not staying in San Francisco. “Don’t you like it here?” asked his father.

  I burst out, “No, no, it is not our life we are living here, it is yours—your friends, your business, your bridge parties and dinner parties and I don’t like your way of life.”

  He went out, slamming the door in anger or in tears. I know now that we must have seemed to him vulnerable and too young to be out in a world of which he knew nothing. I think now that he was afraid for us. But we had found people out in the larger world to be open and friendly to us wherever we had been; his life did not hold for us this wealth of people of all classes that we wanted to know. I think we felt the world was ours, and that it was not his to give to us.

  Young George and Mary, or George and Mary now—so long as it is George and Mary it is life as I have known and lived it, as we have known and lived it. The young people now come to visit, to talk, and they seem happy just to look at us, survivors. Perhaps they are strengthened by a view of us which represents fifty years together in a fully lived life. This achievement, be it luck or choice, has been inevitable.

  First Travels

  1928–1929

  We packed our two suitcases, leaving the other acquisitions to Nellie and Jack in Berkeley, and left town in an agitated frame of mind from our quarrel with George’s father. We had now grown even more wary of those who tried to control us. In Portland we sold our car, asking a friend to hold the money for us while we continued eastward, hitchhiking. We headed for the Midwest, meeting and talking with other young people on the road as we hitchhiked. We rode with businessmen, salesmen, and one young couple with an infant whose car had flat tire after flat tire, which we repaired for them.

  The Midwest meant to us not only the geographical center of our country, but a center for the poetry which was being written everywhere, which meant that a literature was being written out of our times. We carried with us Conrad Aiken’s Anthology of Poetry, and in Chicago we thought of Sandburg and of Sherwood Anderson, whose writings colored the landscape as surely as the landscape shaped and colored their writing. These were the times into which we emerged.

  We arrived at Detroit, on wide and lovely Lake St. Clair. The wind was free and George could sail, and when we examined our road map we saw that we could sail to New York. We sent for the money from the sale of our car and found a cat-boat, which a young man sold us together with an old outboard motor and an old gasoline stove. Our first sail, which was a short turn out of the harbor and back in again, frightened me—I had not known that the boat would heel over in the wind. Our cat-boat was a wide, low-sided boat with one mast set in the very eye of her bows. Her only sail was an almost rectangular gaff-rig sail; she was very simple to handle and had ample room for us to lie full-length beside her centerboard to sleep. She was slow to windward but fast before the wind, and with her centerboard up we could paddle close inshore—but most important, the wind was free.

  We sailed down Lake St. Clair and down the river into Lake Erie. Storms, which are dramatic and beautiful on the lakes, came up suddenly on hot days; a bank of black cloud would arrive swiftly, and we kept a sharp lookout for these short but violent storms. When one hit us, we took down our sail and sat out the storm. We swam if the day was too hot, trailing a rope behind the boat for safety; we drank the lake water, which was clear and clean. These were the times of the Volstead Act, or Prohibition, and a Coast Guard cutter was tied up in every harbor mouth to chase rum-runners, who ran liquor into the United States from Canada at night. We found that if we tied up beside the Coast Guard boat and made friends with the cook he would usually feed us. At eveningtime we tried to be in a harbor, for after a day’s sailing we were eager to walk and explore and talk to whomever we met. The river-mouths were the harbors, and the industrial towns had a quayside with facilities for loading and unloading the ships that plied the waters from Chicago to Buffalo. Canada was across the lake, with its many towns along its shores. Traffic in grain and ores as well as passengers moved on the lake, an inland sea 240 miles long and over fifty miles wide. Sailboats were fast disappearing by 1928; only old-timers were still interested in sailing, and it seemed to us the right time for the canal trip.

  (The barge canal is no longer open all the way across New York State. Now, such a trip would have to be made through the St. Lawrence waterway to Montreal and the Atlantic Ocean, and the big ships and tankers would not give a twenty-foot sailboat a tow.)

  As we drew near the end of Lake Erie we watched for the entrance to the Erie Canal. I didn’t know what to expect, but I had imagined a marquee or a large sign over the entrance under which we would sail into the canal. Instead, we found ourselves drawn into an increasing current, and in a sweep of excitement George yelled through the foggy mist created by the falls, “Throw the anchor, we’re near the falls!” We paddled over to the lakeside, and after collecting ourselves a little we sailed back along the edge of the lake, out of the current, and examined the lake side until we found the unmarked entrance to the canal. Unnoted, we entered and began the long locking process. We had sailed this far on our trip with only the road map we had used for hitchhiking as guide!

  Lake Erie is 570 feet above the sea, and the system of locks took us daily nearer to the Hudson River. At each lock we tied up at the side of the canal until there was room for us to go through with a barge. We took great care that our boat not be crushed or scraped in the lowering water and current, for when the water is released it lowers suddenly. We lowered lock by lock. Along the way we made friends with bargemen, and we often hitched a ride behind a barge. We found that the cook was always glad to be invited to sit with us on our little boat to escape the heat and vibration of the big steel barge. The cooks who rode with us were Scandinavian, and they showed us snapshots of their families in Sweden or Norway, where women in 1928 were dressed in styles my grandmothers had worn; these cooks also fed us—soup and coffee was the usual handout. Family-owned barges also plied the canal,
with the family aboard and the children playing about the decks. Special schools at each end of the canal allowed the children of the bargemen to keep up with their schoolwork.

  We tied up at night to a wide place in the canal and went for a walk to stretch our legs and to see what was on the other side of the high banks of the canal. We walked on paths that the horses had used in earlier days, when the barges were horse-drawn. We reached the end of the Erie Canal at Albany, which is on the Hudson River, and across the river in Renssalaer we found a small boat yard where we had our boat hauled out for a paint job. George remembers asking the man there what the lines which lift the boom were called—he had forgotten the word between ages five and twenty.

  “Toppinglifts,” the man replied scornfully.

  We scraped our boat’s sides and her almost-flat bottom, painted her topsides black (they had been white) and her bottom with copper paint for the salt water of the Atlantic Ocean, and left her while we went to look at Albany, the capital city of New York State. While we were away from our boat someone scrawled on our new paint, and the job had to be done again.

  We left the canal at Albany to go down the Hudson River to New York City. The lovely Hudson River, held between its high cliffs, is a clear, fast-flowing deep river, widening in only a few spots. In one such spot, just above the city of Nyack, we anchored near the shore in shallow water. In the middle of the night we were suddenly thrown on the boat’s side, and George found himself in the water, holding the boat up to keep her from broaching. The Albany nightboat had passed by, going full speed, and water, which had been drawn from beneath us, came back with a rush. George knocked off the hatch-cover, which had been firmly built into the boat, when he left the cabin precipitately, and we never did find it. As we neared the city (at that time there was no George Washington Bridge) we found we had gone faster than we had reckoned, probably because the tide was stronger nearer to the sea. We were in New York City, and the white walls at the tops of the cliffs were the apartment houses of the Bronx and upper Manhattan. George suddenly called, “Throw the anchor, my Aunt Agnes lives up there.” I threw the anchor into the river at Seventy-ninth Street—where the yacht basin is today. We climbed the steel stair and bridge built over the railway tracks to Riverside Drive, but Aunt Agnes didn’t live there anymore, and the doorman suggested that years had passed since she had left. We were dressed as we had dressed all summer on the boat: I was wearing a middy blouse and skirt, and George wore white pants, given him by one of the Coast Guard cooks, which were too large. We walked among the conservatively-dressed population of the city, and I stared in wonder at the skyscrapers, which in 1928 were unique to New York City. I rode my first double-decker bus. We found no places to sit and rest, no vacant lots as in most cities where one could sit undisturbed. We were told to move on whenever we sat on steps or beside statues or on curbstones; when we sat in hotel lobbies we were told to go away because we were not dressed in New York City style.